Understanding Homelessness

The Team

Project Lead/s: Zack Almquist

Data Science Lead/s: June Yang

DSSG Fellows: Felix Junior Appiah Kubi, Brooke Kaye, Jess Robinson, Rebecca Schachtman

Executive summary

The US Department of Housing and Urban Development released the 2023 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) on December 15, 2023. The report estimates that 653,100 people in the U.S. experienced homelessness in 2023, a 12% increase from 2022. This estimate comes from the Point-in-Time (PIT) count conducted on a single night in January over communities across the US. The PIT, which is mandated by HUD every two years, is composed of two key elements: (1) the emergency shelter report from administrative records and (2) the unsheltered PIT count typically performed on a single night in January through volunteers walking around the community and tabulating how many people they see. This so-called “visual census” of unsheltered people experiencing homelessness has a number of issues, from methodology (people are undercounted for a number of reasons) to ethics (people don’t get a voice in how they are counted). In other words, there is much room for improvement in understanding our unhoused neighbors.

A team at UW led by Dr. Zack Almquist has been working with the King County Regional Homelessness Authority since 2022 to improve the unsheltered PIT methodology and accompanying demographic and needs assessment surveys. In 2022, the University of Washington and KCRHA implemented a novel, network-based method for counting the unsheltered people experiencing homelessness known as Respondent-Driven Sampling. That was followed by a larger pilot study conducted in 2023, resulting in a dataset containing rich network and demographic information from 1,100+ sheltered and unsheltered people.

This year’s DSSG project finalized the 2023 data set and conducted analyses to better understand the needs of people experiencing homelessness. The team produced data summaries, policy reports, and created an this website to host the findings and describe the method for other communities to use.